Johnson highlights four times the two giant social networks took ideas from each other and tried to implement themselves. The first is the cosmetic change Twitter made to change its "Favorite" button, in the shape of a star, into a "Like" button in the shape of a heart. It makes sense as a change, as one would have a lot of "likes" of tweets than "favorites," and the micro-blogging social networks was looking to increase user engagement. But, as Johnson notes, reaction to the change was mixed.

The second imitation was Facebook's jump into live streaming, in imitation of Twitter's Periscope app. Facebook Live Video was tested earlier this year and then rolled out to the general audience in December, allowing the social giant to compete with Periscope, or at least keep it from growing into too dominant a position in the field of live streaming.

And last is Facebook's app Instagram becoming more text heavy, and adding an "Explore" feature that lets users categorize and search by hashtag, which is one of the feature for which Twitter is most known and most used.

And because we live in the digital age, this sort of imitation can often be done very easily, and very quickly. In the pre-digital era, when a manufacturer created an innovation that manufacturer's competitors would have to reverse-engineer it, change their own manufacturing processes, and make a slew of other adjustments if they wanted to compete. The process could take years.

Now, although it isn't instantaneous or anything, all a tech leader or CEO needs to do is go to his software engineers and ask "Can we do that too?" More and more and faster than ever it seems, the answer to that question is yes.